Jayanti Chauhan: Bisleri founder's daughter back in 1,000 crore family biz after a year

MUMBAI: A year after walking out of the family business, Jayanti Chauhan is back in the hot seat, learning the ropes and preparing to pick up the baton from her father, the 71-year-old founder of the 1,000 crore iconic bottled water brand Bisleri. "The brand is not for sale as long as I am alive. Give me four years and you will see a different avatar of Bisleri," thunders the 27-year-old feisty director at the 43-year-old pioneer in bottled water.

Cut to April 2009. Founder Ramesh Chauhan, conscious that he isn't getting younger, pulls in his only daughter to groom her to run the operation. Jayanti, however, didn't quite take to it like a duck to, well, water. For one, she found the Delhi office depressing, lost her way in the system, and got duly de-motivated. By September 2010, Jayanti had winged her way out of Bisleri, and taken off to London.

There, for a lark, she did a Masters in Arabic from the School of Oriental and African Studies; and after that she travelled across the globe. Back home, the patriarch was getting increasingly nervous. He recognised that if his daughter could nurture the brand in the years ahead, the value of Bisleri would appreciate faster than the money he would pocket by selling it. Still, calls from interested buyers and bankers keen to broker a deal had Chauhan on the edge. A sale would seem the most logical way to go.

In September 2011, Ramesh Chauhan heaved a sigh of relief. Jayanti was back in India. "I am back for good," she declares. The break, she adds, "put things in perspective and motivated me to come out of my comfort zone. I have grown up a lot in that one year." The Chauhan scion also lets on that the knowledge that Bisleri was being eyed by potential acquirers made her more conscious about her "legacy".

The first change in her second wind is to move out of the Delhi office into the one in Mumbai. Day-to-day mentoring by her father is keeping her in "good spirits". "It is a treat to work with him. I am learning a lot from his enormous business understanding and brilliance. We are like the Batman-Robin duo," says Jayanti as she goes about organising a football match between employees to foster team spirit.

Jayanti's mandate is three-fold: one, shake-up the group's HR structure to move people out of dead-end jobs and fire up the team. Two, ensure that Bisleri doesn't lose share - Jayanti says it stands at 70% - to a host of rivals. And three, revive premium water brand Vedika by hiving it out of the Bisleri set-up to help differentiate between processed water (Bisleri) and natural mineral water (Vedika).

Her father is with her every step of the way. Jayanti attends every meeting and employee interaction with her dad. Says the chairman: "She needs another year to understand the business completely. But she is better at handling people than me. My head is full of old ideas and she understands the requirements of the current generation."

Parag Bengali, a director on the Bisleri board, is another who reckons Jayanti "is even better than her dad she since meets us regularly with marketing ideas and potentially game-changing strategies. And she is also willing to learn."

All eyes will be on brand Vedika, which is now Jayanti's baby. It was her decision to create a separate network away from the mass brand to turn around its fortunes. Ramesh Chauhan agrees with the new strategy.

"Nobody understood the difference between natural mineral water and processed water. Handling it separately makes great business sense," he says.

In the new scheme of things, Bisleri will also have a chief operating officer who will report into Jayanti. Chauhan is confident that tensions between the two will not erupt, as is known to happen in family-owned organisations. "Conflicts arise when there are more than two children to handle the business which is not the case here," says the founder.

Jayanti has begun travelling across India to get a sense of Bisleri's operations and manufacturing plants. "At any time during the day I am interacting with key people at the bottling plant, and at the shipping and distribution divisions. For me it is an ongoing learning experience."

Recently, the father gifted his daughter a Canon EOS 5D, "which I carry when I travel," says Jayanti. But what if she decides to up and leave again? The father isn't worried. And the daughter is sure she is here for the long haul. "One of my long-term goals is to take Bisleri outside of India," she signs off.